It’s almost midnight when Deborah Tipton settles down to study the evidence once again. In her grand Memphis home, the scene of elegant dinner parties and fundraisers, police reports and private investigators’ notes cover an antique dining table. As if searching for a clue from beyond the grave, she pores over the most painful pages, the ones containing text messages from her dead son.
“Getting hazed bad now and need Xanax. I didn’t even sleep last night and was shaking.”
“I can’t trust anyone right now.”
“What could they do that’s so bad in two hours. They’re just going to yell at us a bunch and maybe make us work out or eat something nasty. They can’t kill us.”
Tipton has struggled to untangle the last hours of her son’s life ever since March 26, 2012, the balmy Monday when police officers gave her the news. Robert, 22 and a junior at High Point University in North Carolina, was dead. The authorities would later rule his death an accident, a drug overdose, another example of fraternity partying run amok. Case closed.
To his mother, however, it remains very much open. Her singular quest to solve it may test the power of America’s college fraternities, which have beaten back such inquiries for generations. Fraternities own $3 billion in real estate and house a quarter of a million students who tap into an unrivaled alumni network of presidents, members of Congress, corporate executives and Wall Street investors.
Facing such opposition, most might be daunted. Not Deborah Tipton. Heir to a fortune in rice and cottonseed oil, she has the money and connections to fight a forever war. For six years, she has poured her substantial resources into solving the riddle of what happened that weekend at her son’s Delta Sigma Phi fraternity chapter. The $1 million bill for investigators and lawyers — to date — is no barrier.
And Tipton says she has found plenty to make her question the official story. Four years after Robert’s death, her team got its hands on the full police file. The autopsy photos showed that he had angry purple bruises on his face, around his neck and on his legs and buttocks, as well as a jagged gash on his head.
A police detective had jotted down notes. “Bruises?’” she scrawled. “How and where did they come from? Talk to Frat Brothers.” The detective later acknowledged she never did. High Point University had insisted on a subpoena before providing names, she said, but the police department never sent one.
Tipton says the university is covering up the truth, in part because the son of High Point University President Nido Qubein belonged to the fraternity. In her view, the police have no interest in going after one of the community’s most influential institutions.